As March 1862 began in Washington, D.C., slavery was on the ropes in the nation’s capital. The previous December, a bill had been introduced in Congress providing for compensated emancipation there. By March, this legislation was well on its way to passage and it would become law on April 16, 1862, a day now celebrated as an official holiday in the District of Columbia.

Yet this would not have been clear in February and March of 1862 from watching the legal apparatus that enforced slavery in the city. As the first hints of spring made themselves manifest in Washington, D.C. in 1862, this machinery continued to grind along, seemingly oblivious of its impending doom. The National Republican, Washington, D.C.’s newspaper aligned with the Republican Party, noticed this fact in its issue of February 28, 1862. It wrote:

The National Republican was referring to a scandal that had broken out the previous December when it was revealed about sixty African Americans were being held in horrible conditions in Washington’s jail on suspicion of being fugitive slaves. Some were not even fugitives or alleged fugitives, but slaves whose owners had gone south at the start of the Civil War and left them at the jail for safe-keeping. Kate Masur deals with this episode quite capably in a piece from late last year in Disunion in the New York Times.

The slaves were supposed to have been released in late January on written instructions from Secretary of State William Seward, acting on orders from President Lincoln, to Ward Lamon, a close associate of Abraham Lincoln, who then held the position of U.S. Marshal for the District of Columbia. Apparently not all the alleged fugitives had been released by the end of February, and it is also clear that the police in the District were still busy in late February 1862 filling their jail with other unfortunate African Americans that came to their attention. So while Congress was in the process of legislating the end of slavery in Washington, D.C., to the District police, accustomed to enforcing slave law, it remained business as usual.

It was not just the District police that were carrying on as they always had as part of slavery’s enforcement machinery. In March 1862, just a month before the bill to end slavery in the District of Columbia became law, an unnamed lawyer published a guide to the city’s slave code. Although no doubt a work that had been some time coming, it is fascinating and revealing that such a publication would be released at that moment. The bill ending slavery in Washington, D.C., had not yet passed Congress and even at that late date there were still people in the nation’s capital invested in the enforcement machinery of slavery there and continuing to act as if its days were not numbered.

But it is also clear from the scandal surrounding the D.C. jail that Constable Keese and the unnamed lawyer were rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Those in power were no longer ignoring the plight of fugitives slaves (discussion of which reached the floor of Congress) and were starting to muster their will to the difficult task of outlawing the peculiar institution. They did so because of the growing hostility to slavery in the North unleashed by the war. People that had held their peace about slavery before the war in the name of sectional peace, with the war’s mounting toll, now felt free to vent their anger. No longer did the slaveholders get the benefit of the doubt, which went increasingly instead to the slaves. No where can this fact be seen more clearly than in the last paragraph of February 28 story in The National Republican which read:

[Personal note: I apologize for the lack of blog posts lately in Civil War Emancipation. There was a lack of good subject matter to write on in late February 1862 and I was extremely busy at work. Relevant material will be more plentiful now and in the coming months, and I’m hoping to have more time to work on the blog during this period as well. March 1862 to the end of that year are an important time in the history of emancipation during the American Civil War.]

Share this:

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

About Donald R. Shaffer

Donald R. Shaffer is the author of _After the Glory: The Struggles of Black Civil War Veterans_ (Kansas, 2004), which won the Peter Seaborg Award for Civil War Scholarship in 2005. More recently he published (with Elizabeth Regosin), _Voices of Emancipation: Understanding Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction through the U.S. Pension Bureau Files_ (2008). Dr. Shaffer teaches online exclusively (i.e., a virtual professor). He lives in Arizona and can be contacted at donald_shaffer@yahoo.com